In Courtly Mediators, Leah R. Clark investigates the exchange of a range of materials and objects, including metalware, ceramic drug jars, Chinese porcelain, and aromatics, across the early modern Italian, Mamluk, and Ottoman courts. She provides a new narrative that places Aragonese Naples at the center of an international courtly culture, where cosmopolitanism and the transcultural flourished, and in which artists, ambassadors, and luxury goods actively participated. By articulating how and why transcultural objects were exchanged, displayed, copied, and framed, she provides a new methodological framework that transforms our understanding of the Italian Renaissance court. Clark's volume provides a multi-sensorial, innovative reading of Italian Renaissance art. It demonstrates that the early modern culture of collecting was more than a humanistic enterprise associated with the European roots of the Renaissance. Rather, it was sustained by interactions with global material cultures from the Islamic world and beyond.
Über den Autor Leah R. Clark
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Leah R. Clark is a Lecturer in the Department of Art History at The Open University, Milton Keynes. Her research explores the roles that the exchange, collection, and replication of objects played in the creation of social networks in the fifteenth century. She is co-editor (with Nancy Um) of a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History, and her work has appeared in a number of publications including the Journal of the History of Collections. She has received prestigious awards and fellowships from a variety of institutions including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
